Irrational Thoughts
by daredeer
Summary: Kaiba knows his thoughts have taken an erratic turn, particularly in regards to Jounouchi, but he doesn't need a bloody therapist. He doesn't need to hold hands and talk about his feelings. He just wants his feelings to get the hell out.


This is essentially an experiment in characterisation... and I wholly blame 'I Wanna Be Yours' by the Arctic Monkeys.  
Warning: slight mentions of sexual masochism.  
_

In the words of his therapist, Kaiba Seto's refusal to connect with others causes him to 'increase the burden he places upon himself'. Without sharing his thoughts, the pressure to keep them secret increases. This leads to 'an inability to trust others, and a fixed perception that all humans function within absolute isolation'.

Kaiba thinks this is bullshit.

In his own words, as declared to his therapist, the report was: 'the standard contrived claptrap designed to promote insecurity and ensure repeated sessions resulting in a dependence on one's therapist'.

Although, Kaiba always gave respect where it was due. Considering that their sessions usually consisted of them both sitting in stubborn silence for an hour, he was almost impressed by the fabrications of this particular psychiatrist, who came oh-so-highly-recommended and had doctorates coming out of his arse. He'd only hired him for Mokuba's sake, anyway. Seto doesn't have the _time_ for a psychiatrist. He has no desire to discuss his inner thoughts, because they belong to him; they are _his_ , and _he_ decides to share them with those whom he deems fit.

There are times when he wishes someone suitable would materialise at long last, because he is _tired_ of keeping it all to himself. There's power in holding one's tongue, yes- but it's getting to that danger point again where the next time Jounouchi asks him what the hell he's playing at, rich boy, Seto fears that he might just answer with the secrets he's finding it harder and harder to repress.

Like how he despises Jounouchi's post-smokers' habit of chewing anything that goes near his mouth, and how the sight of teethmarks on the mutt's water bottle lid makes his stomach churn and his lip curl, but that doesn't stop him from collecting the discarded pens that Jou is always dropping in class and forgetting to pick up again – because he fiddles with them instead of paying attention, twirling them between roughened fingertips until they spiral across the scratchy carpet out of his reach, and Kaiba cringes every time he picks one up and slips it into his trouser pocket, where he feels it slender against his thigh of the rest of the day until, in the privacy of his bedroom, he can run his tongue along the bumps and ridges made by Jounouchi's teeth, and press the nib into his skin until it threatens to puncture, before carefully storing the cheap biro along with the others in a particular thin, metal box stowed beneath his mattress, which is an unforgivably predictable hiding place.

There are times when Seto has considered uploading selective parts of his memory to his personal data files, perhaps encrypting them, and slotting them within the password-protected depths of his most secure account. However, even filed as such, they would never be truly safe. Being the head of one of the most prestigious, media-present, high-stakes companies in the world, he receives reports of an average thirteen new hacking and virus alerts every week. Even with regards to his personal laptop and duel disk, the stored data is always unlockable by the right access code. Technology can never be held 100% accountable, even that which is made by his own hands.

So he must keep his thoughts within, even as they threaten to escape his dreams and irreparably disfigure his waking life. He has a reputation to upkeep. He's in the public eye. He has to appear untouchable. Which is why, when the dirty bathroom tiles in the boys lavatory are cold against his knees and wiry, dark blonde hairs tickle the end of his nose, he can't exactly let Jounouchi's cock slip from his lips and reveal hoarsely that for months he's wanted the punk to carve his initials into his right hipbone with a fountain pen, or perhaps a singular blade from a pair of nail clippers, shallowly but enough to scar; enough for the imprint to remain and remind. To share this thought would have disastrous consequences, even though the impulse to do so peaks every time he gets a look at those hot, angry brown eyes.

At least he's not deluded as to think these desires are within the rational sphere. As he reminds himself on a daily basis: the fact that he knows he cannot divulge these thoughts without dire consequence logically implies that he understands they are abnormal. This is reassuring. He wouldn't trust himself to continue his care of Mokuba if he had the slightest suspicion of his own mental instability. However, this leads to the more unsettling questions of why the fuck he has these thoughts in the first place, and from what cavern of his brain they stemmed from, and why the hell he can't seem to stop them from becoming progressively more concerned with submissive capitulation.

Seto has read Freud – in the original German, so there'd be no margin for misinterpretation by the cause of translation inadequacies – and he knows the theory of the unconscious. He has applied the original and the post-theories to his own circumstance, and if he knew of another human being in whom he could place his entire faith, he could explain the psychology of his own childhood development without a single hitch. Yet he refuses to indulge in any of it. The explanations seem to unravel the knots a little _too_ mechanically – and leave a few too many loose ends untied. Besides, explanations are the last thing on his mind when he's waking at night sweaty and panting and hard as a rock, the scarlet beads so vivid in his dream that he's startled to find there's not a scratch anywhere on his skin.

Jounouchi's hands are callused and his nails ragged from being bitten, and their textures cause friction on his pulse as they scrape against his inner wrists. Kaiba's arms are aching from being held above his head, and his knuckles are sore from being rubbed against the uneven plaster wall of the supply cupboard, but still he gasps 'faster, more, harder-' hotly into Jou's ear because these are the things it is _acceptable_ to say. Whereas the burning in his throat compels him to scream, and he catches a glimpse of Jou's stained teeth glistening behind bruised lips and imagines them rupturing his jugular, and his hips stutter and his breath catches and Jou starts _ramming_ into him, their bodies fighting for the same space, it's still not enough, not nearly enough. And when those marvellous hands have been stuffed into the polyester pockets of a faded school uniform and a roughened voice is asking, rhetorically, 'Why the hell do we do this?', Seto Kaiba merely picks up his briefcase and walks away, feeling semen slick down between his thighs and wishing he could keep it inside him. They'd used a condom once, only once, when tensions had escalated above the line of sanity and fists had redirected from faces to cocks. Although he never found the actual rubber part, Kaiba still has the foil wrapper. It's crinkled up, pushed down deep into the pocket of a pair of black trousers, which hang all enclosed and vacuum-pressed into a dry cleaners bag in his second closet - although they've never once been dry-cleaned and the cum stains are still visible.

Once, he untangled his fingers from the back of Jou's head and discovered four long, wispy hairs clinging to the palm of his hand. Two of them retained clumps of cells at the follicle end. He still has them, although they're faded now. He wrapped them around the head of his key to the mansion gates, and even though the gates are now electronically operated via a switch in the limo and another just by the door into the mansion's front foyer, it still gives him a cheap thrill when he feels the contrast of metal and hair against the pad of his thumb.

When that waste-of-time therapist had asked him if he'd ever had a girlfriend or a boyfriend, Seto couldn't help the way his lower eyelid twitched in a subtle tell. Though he could play that off to tiredness. Tiredness was expected of him. His life was suitably exhausting. His job was high-stakes, and he took regular exercise to stave off the stress. Kaiba knew his limits, and he dealt with the outcomes. There was scarce reason for these mental _aberrations_ , and yet Jounouchi fucking Katsuya continued to be the first vision of his minds eye at the start of every waking day. And Seto Kaiba didn't much appreciate when the existence of things could not be rationally explained in a manner he believed in.

So the next time he closed his hand over a folded note flicked onto his desk by a passing mutt, and read the scrawl of rushed handwriting dictating _third period. boys locker room_ , Kaiba wrote his response on the back of the paper but ended up never passing it on to the intended recipient, instead burning it over the gas hob at home in the early hours of the next morning. The bright blue flame licked away his response, which had read ' _I would like you to scratch patterns into my shoulder blades with your geometry compass_ ', and when the message had completely evaporated from the plenum of realitty, Seto stored it away in his memory where only he would know of its existence.


End file.
